8 Jun 2017

We are proud to announce a brand new addition to ESO’s collection of free high-quality planetarium materials produced by world-renowned astrophotographers, artists, technicians and musicians. Out There — The Quest for Extrasolar Worlds tells the story of how human curiosity has driven us to look outwards for millennia, to discover and explore new and distant worlds and to find the unfamiliar and extraordinary forms of life that could exist in the mysterious realms of the Universe.
The show is a production by The Swiss Museum of Transport Planetarium, directed and produced by Marc Horat, in cooperation with National Centre of Competence in Research PlanetS and ESO. The show lasts 30 minutes and is suitable for family audiences.

Out There — The Quest for Extrasolar Worlds will transport viewers from this world to entirely new and foreign ones. The show features the primitive science fiction of early civilisations, to the future space missions that will observe the Universe in greater-than-ever detail and travel to the surfaces and oceans of moons in our Solar System.
The show is offered for free to the planetarium community in ESO’s Member States and beyond as part of the ESO Supernova mission to become the world’s first open source planetarium. Interested planetarium managers can download the show from the dedicated webpage in 4k. Versions with English, Italian, French and German narrations are available. Supporting material is available in the form of posters, scripts and more.

The full range of free material for planetariums is available on the ESO Supernova website. This includes full free planetarium shows, 450 fulldome clips from the ESO and ESA/Hubble archives, 360-degree panoramas, a new music archive with 350 free music tracks, 3D models of everything from ESO telescopes to orbits within the Milky Way, and much more. These materials will be used in the ESO Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Centre in Garching, Germany, which will open in Spring 2018.